Part 16: Mitch the Morgoth Masher

Last time we dove to the bottom of Angband, only to find it mysteriously bereft of evil gods. I think I've figured out what's going on -- it's possible Sauron and Morgoth won't show up if you have any outstanding random quests, and we did manage to skip a few on the way down, either via special levels (which force generation of their down stairs) or via shafts, which are like stairs but can skip levels.

So now we get to climb back up Angband to search it for missing swords (the princesses are all rescued as we had to save them to be able to descend). And of course we still can't use teleportation to make the process easier. At least I'm confident we aren't missing anyone in the other three main dungeons (Barrow-Downs, Mirkwood, and Mordor), where I made a point of doing all the quests.

First though, we have a lizard to kill.



Two tiles south of us is the Tarrasque, arguably the most lethal single monster in the game. Flavor text: "The Tarrasque is a massive reptile of legend, rumoured to be unkillable and immune to magic. Fear its anger, for its devastation is unmatched!"

Really, the Tarrasque is a very simple monster. It has decently powerful melee, but the key to its power is that every turn it has a 50% chance of breathing fire, cold, or disenchantment on you, and it has the health (13,000 HP) to make those breaths hurt. Most monsters in the game have lower odds of using a spell and/or have lots of "dud" spells in their repertoire, making it less likely that they'll use their more dangerous abilities. The Tarrasque is just a balls-to-the-wall damage machine. In my Vanilla Angband LPs, I ran three characters through to victory, and only one bothered to tackle killing the Tarrasque -- because only one of the characters was able to cast the kinds of big healing spells needed to keep up with its damage output.

Mitch, of course, can just slam the poor thing in a Black Hole or two before it even gets into line-of-sight.

Anyway. On level 96, Fumblefingers' sword got stolen by 15 Elder Vampires. Ironically these guys are far more easily dealt with than the lower-level monsters in the area, because they haven't received any levelup boosts. There's nothing quite like being mobbed by a horde of level-48 Novice Paladins moving at +50 speed and with mendaciously powerful melee. Sure, they can only cast Cause Minor Wounds (and aren't any more likely than before to pass our saving throw), but chewing through their stupidly huge HP is a real chore. Meanwhile, Elder Vampires are merely at +10 speed and have the decency to die to a single Black Hole.

On level 93, we get a bit too close to the Witch-King of Angmar, leader of the Ringwraiths, and he wakes up at an inopportune time...



The Witch-King of Angmar wakes up. The Witch-King of Angmar misses you. The Witch-King of Angmar hits you. Your foe calls upon your soul! You feel the Black Breath slowly draining you of life... The Witch-King of Angmar hits you. You keep hold of your life force! The Witch-King of Angmar misses you.

Blast. So we'll have to get that taken care of, eventually. Meanwhile of course we stuff the Witch-King into a Black Hole.

The Witch-King of Angmar says: 'No one to play soldier now, no one to pretend.' The Witch-King of Angmar is destroyed. Somehow you feel he is not totally destroyed...

It occurs to me to wonder if Adunaphel the Quiet, the only female Ringwraith, gets the correct pronoun in that message. Something to keep an eye out for if she returns.

On level 92, Fumblefingers lost his sword to 18 Lesser Titans. Titans are pretty dangerous, as their melee confuses you when it hits you, and they hit very hard. If you aren't protected from confusion, you can get into trouble fast.

While resting up after killing some titans, we get this message:

You feel ugly for a moment, but the feeling passes.

This isn't Mitch experiencing momentary body dysmorphia; that was the Black Breath trying and failing to do something to us, because our CHA score is sustained. In fact, all of our stats are sustained, and we also have protection against experience drain, so I think the Black Breath is in fact totally neutered against us. Ha ha, screw you Ringwraiths.

Finally, I think, on level 90, Fumblefingers lost his sword to a pack of 17 Osyluths, scorpion-like greater demons. At least the level is small.


(Shown here partially-completed already)

And then I hit an Osyluth with a low-level chaos ball and it gets polymorphed, making the quest uncompleteable. Nothing that returning to the level can't fix, but of course the second version of the level is huge, and we have to kill all 17 of them all over again.

Anyway, that done, we should be all set to kill Morgoth. But first let's head back to town and get our embarassing little disease taken care of. Over in the southeast corner of Gondolin is the Earth-Dome.





Herbal Healing replicates the effects of eating a Sprig of Athelas.

The hold of the Black Breath on you is broken!

In absolute terms, it's expensive, but considering our current net worth we don't really care.

Before we head back down and shank ourselves an upstart evil god, let's take a quick look at Mitch.



Stats are all but maxed at 40 across the board, thanks to our Amulet of DOOM. Our hitpoints are insanely great, as is our mana pool, and Tulkas is bonkers crazy about us. Our melee is abysmal, of course, but who cares?



This and the following pages show what our equipment is doing for us in a tabular form; each column is the modifications from an equipment slot, and the @ column is for innate or miscellaneous abilities (so our STR/CON boosts from worshipping Tulkas show up there). The * for speed is from our Ring of Speed +19, whose double-digit bonus breaks the table.



These should mostly be fairly self-explanatory. "Sens Fire" means the item makes us vulnerable to fire, and "Hold Life" grants protection against experience drain. Ideally we would have picked up resistance to shards/nether/nexus, but at this point we have the HP needed to survive max-damage hits from those elements with room to spare.



Our Amulet of DOOM can re-curse itself, hence the "Auto Curse" entry. "Digestion" is slow digestion, and "EvilCurse" is the Curse of Topi Ylinen (former maintainer of ZAngband) that causes random awful stuff to happen to you while you're wielding the item in question. Don't use equipment with ancient foul curses on it!



"No blows" prevents you from engaging in melee, and functions as a type of curse. "Precognition" gives you insight into what exactly is on the dungeon; it's equivalent to turning on the cheat "peek into dungeon creation", I believe. I don't know what "Recharge" is for. "Mrg.Curse" is the "ancient Morgothian curse" that DarkGod invented because he loved the idea of the Curse of Topi Ylinen and so had to have his own version. I'm sure it's even worse than Topi's curse. "Clone" causes the item to clone your enemies when you hit them with it. "ESP" lets you "see" monsters that aren't in line of sight. We have full ESP thanks to having at least 40 ranks in Mindcrafting, which allows us to see any monster that has a brain, as well as some more specific ESP types from our gear. Full ESP is also available on gear, but it's pretty rare.

Here's Mitch's skills now that he's completed every Fumblefingers quest and spent all his points:



We picked up a few more points in Magic, Mindcrafting, Conveyance, and Divination; nothing all that significant.

Now for our spells. First, the Conveyance realm:



All of these spells except for Phase Door see regular use. Traps, especially deep in the dungeon, can really wreck your shit, so being able to safely magically disarm them is reliably useful. Teleporting is probably not a good idea to use regularly, but sometimes it's the fastest way to travel (even if it is random) and I am lazy. Mitch doesn't have to stoop to casting Teleport Away all that often, plus many powerful ToME monsters resist teleportation, but it's still useful. And Recall and Probability Travel are of course both staples.

Now, Divination:



Reveal Ways is the only real dud here. Sense Hidden keeps us from stumbling into traps, Sense Monsters detects all monsters, mindful or not, and has a wider radius than our ESP anyway. They both give us buffs as well (temporary ESP and temporary see invisible), hence the durations in their descriptions. And of course Identify/Vision/Greater Identify are always handy.

And Temporal:



I'll be honest here, all I ever cast from this realm is Essence of Speed. We could have gotten its temporary boost up to +25 if we'd maxed the Temporal realm, but we didn't, oh well. Banishment is kind of pointless considering that Teleport Away is high-enough level to teleport every monster in LOS; Slow Monster is pointless considering we have Black Hole; Magelock allows us to place a Glyph of Warding (which prevents monsters from attacking/passing through the tile it's on), but why spend turns placing glyphs when we can spend those turns killing things?

Our Mindcrafting spells:



Mindcrafting attack damage is a bit lacking, but the utility is unmatched. All we're really using is Minor Displacement and Psychic Drain though. Psychic Drain now hits up to 9 targets and drains from all of them, making it an efficient mana restoration method. Getting our Mindcrafting ranks (and our WIS score) up also greatly reduced our failure rates.

Also, keep those spell costs in mind as you check out our massive suite of Thaumaturgy spells:







That's one hundred randomly-generated attack spells, costing upwards of six times more than the most expensive Mindcrafting spell (or three times more than our most expensive traditional spell, Identify). Thaumaturgy spells are expensive, though there's often no rhyme or reason to what makes them cost.

Also, many of these spells were as-yet unused before I took these screenshots, so I had to cast them to learn their damage, cost, and failure rates. I'm sure Lomelosse at the Earth Dome doesn't mind the burning, acid-melted trees, the random chaos flickerings, the butterflies caught in a temporal warp, or the inexplicable granite walls in the middle of the courtyard. Consider it Mitch's contribution to the modern art scene.

Right, let's head back down and win the game.

Down at level 99, Sauron the Sorcerer has finally gotten off his butt and deigned to show up. He has a Hru carve a path to us (Hrus can bore through solid rock). We teleport the Hru away and prepare to remind Sauron of the not-very-epic Battle of Mount Doom. Does he think things will somehow go differently this time?



Sauron, the Sorcerer starts moving slower. <41x> Sauron, the Sorcerer shrugs off the attack. <11x> Sauron, the Sorcerer grunts with pain.

That's 53 hits from Black Hole, and by my calculations Sauron should currently be at around -390 speed. I'm pretty sure the speed table only goes down to -50 speed, at which point the monster is moving ten times more slowly than a normal-speed monster...and we're at around four times faster than normal speed.

Also, Sauron's 80% dead. Let's make that all dead, shall we?

Sauron, the Sorcerer grunts with pain. <3x> Sauron, the Sorcerer starts moving slower. <11x> Sauron, the Sorcerer screams in pain. Sauron, the Sorcerer screams in agony. Sauron, the Sorcerer says: 'Treason! Treason!' Sauron, the Sorcerer dies.



Oh, the depths of Angband? You mean these depths of Angband? The ones we're already in? Some journey.

You enter a maze of down staircases. Looks like any other level.



It takes a few attempts before Morgoth actually spawns onto the level, which makes me wonder if we didn't need to finish those quests after all. Maybe Sauron was just being recalcitrant earlier. Anyway, we have a random vault just to our east, a Giant Pit in the northwest, and a "moated room" of 2x2 sub-rooms in the northeast. Morgoth's in that last one, the dark gray "P".



Let's prepare the way, shall we? We teleport up to the room to our north:



Haste ourselves, and teleport away the local denizens so they can't interfere.



Morgoth is accompanied by a Spectral Sabre-Toothed Tiger; an annoyance, no more. But I would be remiss if I didn't demonstrate one of the cheesier things you can do with our fancy targeted teleport spell. First, we teleport to a bit north of Morgoth, luring him back northwards...



Then we teleport to the east:



From this position, Morgoth will walk straight to his east, and he'll be unable to see us because of the wall in his way. However, we can see him, so we can pelt him with View spells, or the Mindcrafting spell Mindwave, which hits everything in LOS that has a brain, from perfect safety. When he gets close, we can simply use another targeted teleport spell to move to a different chunk of rock for Morgoth to bore through.

I've used this tactic to kill Morgoth without him getting a single non-movement turn. He chewed up something like eight rows of granite in the process though, because I was dealing damage 200 HP at a time. We can do rather better with Mitch. Instead of teleportation shenanigans, we just entomb ourselves and wait for Morgoth to come to us.



One more turn, and he moves next to us...



Hey, Morgoth! Eat temporal dilation!

Morgoth, Lord of Darkness starts moving slower. <29x> Morgoth, Lord, of Darkness shrugs off the attack. <15x>

Trap set, let's bring out the big guns.



Morgoth, do you know what happened to the dinosaurs?

You failed to get the spell off!

...dammit, so much for my dramatic moment. Let's try that again.

Morgoth, do you know what happened to the dinosaurs?

Morgoth, Lord of Darkness shrugs off the attack. <28x> Morgoth, Lord of Darkness grunts with pain. <2x>

I did.

(Hmm, somewhat poor returns on Tunguska here; I expected more impacts)

One more shot!



And that's the game! I would be remiss if I didn't show off Morgoth's drop, however.



Not all that hot; elemental immunities are chump change these days.



Bard's bow is a decent midgame launcher, but it's hopelessly obsolete now.



Ha! With Grond, even Mitch could be a potent melee threat! And it's a sentient weapon! Unfortunately it causes earthquakes with each strike, which is an almighty pain in the ass -- it ruins cover, destroys items, and can potentially delete the monster you're currently fighting. Also, it prevents spellcasting when wielded and aggravates monsters, so not so good for us.



Morgoth's ridiculous crown is ridiculous.

Next time: the postgame!